Promo-driven development and a bias towards greenfield is something that many engineers in other large tech companies are familiar with, and articles such as this are written by former googlers frustrated with the promo system: https://mtlynch.io/why-i-quit-google/ . Put two and two together and it seems like a likely explanation in light of no additional information and a meme is born.
I come from a company that has a google derived promo system, and I believe it when promo driven development can explain a lot.
Especially when that system values certain things like new 'innovations' vs important maintenance. Or tech leadership of multi-team projects which leads to forcing migrations on the rest of the company to get multi-team points vs. a seamless backwards compatible one done behind the scenes not being a multi-team project, so you don't get promoted for doing it. Or valuing mindless metric number go up over a more thoughtful review of the real impact which, gasp, might not involve some numbers sometimes.
These systems also change very slowly and are hard to change overall. I think google still does 5 leetcode interviews back to back, right? Despite them being shown they're not very good indicators of real job performance?
There's some trivial truth to it, of course, but specific assertions are laughably false and more complicated than you are claiming.
I very much would like to reiterate this sort of thing is unhealthy, the point I was making was people moralize while assigning grand motives to a large # of uncoordinated actions about decisions that are obviously more complicated in real life if you were making them. This sort of is a perfect exercise in that